In Our Opinion: San Marcos Mayor Comments On Trump’s Budget Cuts And The Effect On San Marcos Citizens

Melissa Jewett, Publisher

In an interview with the Austin-American Statesman last week, San Marcos Mayor John Thomaides spoke about the cuts in President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal.

In the article, Mayor Thomaides discussed how the city of San Marcos would be affected by the proposed cuts to the Community Development Block Grant program.

However, his statements raised questions among members of the community. If he’d had an opportunity, he might have clarified. 

President Obama signed the last official federal budget the US had on April 29, 2009. While the president of the United States can propose a budget, the official budget, which the president may or may not sign, is created and passed by Congress.

The City of San Marcos’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget was approved at $185,615,000, and the current FY 2017 budget is $193,165,770.

When the Statesman spoke with the Mayor, he stated,

“The city has received significant benefit from the Community Development Block Grant program,” Thomaides said. “We’ve touched many lives, and we’ve improved our community through various infrastructure projects in low-to-moderate-income neighborhoods, including health and safety improvements as well as quality of life improvements like parks and sidewalks.”

San Marcos receives $500,000 per year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who distributes the CDBGs.

This does not include the $7.7 million in disaster relief for the 2015 floods HUD announced in the beginning of May. It also does not include the $25.08 million in disaster relief the city received last year.

The mayor told the statesman,

“It would devastate our budget,” Thomaides said. “We wouldn’t be able to fund public safety, we wouldn’t be able to fund our normal everyday operations, road improvements. It’d just be impossible. Or unlikely without issuing additional debt.”

But if San Marcos’s FY 2017 Budget is over $193,000,000, is losing the CDBG’s $500,000 grant really a drop in the bucket when the numbers are looked at?

The $500,000 CDBG is only 0.259 percent of the city’s overall current budget. If the city lost the CDBG funding, couldn’t the mayor and the city council save the $0.25 out of every $100 they spend to make up for what they lost?

It’s possible the $632,000 spent last month on the purchase of an additional 52 acres in the middle of Purgatory Creek, the city could fund “various infrastructure projects in low-to-moderate-income neighborhoods, including health and safety improvements as well as quality of life improvements like parks and sidewalks” without the CDBG funding.

According to this year’s approved budget, the items addressed by Mayor Thomaides above and a few more total $65,757,313 to be spent on this year.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Here are the questions and concerns brought forth by his interview with the statesman.

• Why would losing $500,000 per year stop the city from being able to improve its roads or not be able to keep the city daily operations going or its residents safe?
• Isn’t the main duty of any municipality, county, state, or our federal government to keep us safe?

In his closing remark, Thomaides did state the loss of the grant would “devastate” the city’s budget, and the above safety and health maintenance would be “unlikely without issuing additional debt.”